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It’s been a routine weekend Saturday. Today I got up around 6:30, drank coffee in bed for a while then got dressed for breakfast at Papa-Z’s. It’s a diner on Magnolia and Garfield that has a mostly male clientele. Quite of few of the guys drive their old restored classic cars on the weekend and talk shop. This morning was particularly busy, and I thought I might not get a seat, but because I was on my own I was able to snag one of the small booths. AirPods in, I listened to Mark Williams, who hosts the LinkedInformed podcast and muses about all things LinkedIn.

It’s been a weird day. Stephani went to get her facial and I pottered around the house doing odds and ends. I didn’t want to do any work-related stuff but listened to the LinkedInformed Podcast and it included info on an interesting website booleanstrings.com which concentrates on different ways to search on LinkedIn and Google for contacts. I tinkered with the searches a bit and then read a post about loading contacts into Outlook and then seeing which ones are on LinkedIn. I had never tried that, but when I went into Outlook there were only a handful of contacts, one was a contact record titled “Mum” and it included my mother’s phone number. The top of the contact record said “Click to Chat” and I became quite sad knowing it would be impossible to have a quick chat with her since she is no longer alive.

Stephani arrived home and I reheated some Indian food for her from Wednesday evening.

Then I went for a drive to Costa Mesa to pick up some holiday gifts.

After that, I had an In&Out burger for lunch and went for a 2-minute walk around Sammy’s Camera. I’ve been spending a lot of money lately. The 4K Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera that I back ordered in May finally shipped at the end of October and the $2000 bill caused my credit card to spike, but I budgeted for it, so I am not concerned. I am more concerned that I have not spent a lot of time working with it and learned how to use it. It seems like quite an advanced piece of equipment. It supposedly has a good autofocus, but I am not finding it very good at focusing unless done manually and I think it looks for human forms to focus on rather than furniture. My plan for the camera is to replace one of the Canon cameras I have and use it as a primary video camera and of course, start shooting interviews in 4K. I notice that the battery life is poor, but knew this when I bought it, so I invested in a powerful battery pack and cable, which should be here next week. I’d like to make more videos using nicer cameras. I’d like to make videos for myself, but don’t really know yet what I would talk about.

A few weeks ago I bought a new set of LED lights for my video studio because the cheap softbox lights I had were doing a terrible job on green screen. Upon first use, these new ones weren’t very bright so yesterday I boxed them up and sent them back to B&H Photo. They were borderline good enough, not very bright as I say, and I thought I should do the return now and buy better ones later on. What’s the point of this? Well, if you have good lights and a green screen, you spend less time keying out the green background, and I would like to start doing more live video interviews to generate more content, to branch out from videos of the same people. I feel like I am improving as a video producer, but want more content.

I am sad today folks

All of this tinkering with my gear is a big distraction for what’s on my mind, and that is, missing my Mum, and the tremendous loneliness I feel when it comes to the holidays. When I was looking at the contacts in Outlook, and in Gmail and LinkedIn, there were names of people I haven’t spoken to in years. People from companies I worked for who I’ve lost contact with. They say there’s a loneliness epidemic in America, and I believe it. I am so very lonely. There are hundreds of people to talk to, and no-one to talk to. There are people in the list who I thought were friends who ghosted me this year for unknown reasons. I am hurt by this, but can’t bring myself to ask them why. I must pretend that we just don’t talk that much and that for whatever reason, it fizzled. It hurts. I really cared, you know?